The Tea Party and the Taliban

Published 10:00 pm, Sunday, October 3, 2010

Leave it to Delaware's off-the-wall Republican Senate nominee and Tea Party champion Christine O'Donnell to discover God's law at work in Muslim countries ruled by Sharia law.

"I'll tell you, I just came back from the Middle East and it was refreshing, with all that is going on, it was refreshing not to be constantly bombarded with smut all the time," O'Donnell said recently.

The quote could be Exhibit A in support of Markos Moulitsas' thesis in his new book "American Taliban: How War, Sex and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right'" (PoliPoint Press, $15.95) which draws parallels between fundmentalist moral absolutists in two cultures.

Joel Connelly has been a staff columnist for more than 30 years. He comments regularly on politics and public policy.

"The freedoms the (Islamic) jihadists hate are the very same freedoms that our own homegrown regressive ideologues hate: freedom of thought, of inquiry, of lifestyle," Moulitsas writes.

The author, founder of the dailykos.com web site, will be at Third Place Books, Ravenna, 65021 20th Ave. NE, Monday night at 7 p.m.

"American Taliban" is a sometimes-scary romp through excesses of our cultural and religious right. Gary Bauer, former Republican presidential candidate and Family Research Council president, summed up its agenda:

"We are engaged in a social, political and cultural war. There's a lot of talk in America about pluralism. But the bottom line is somebody's values will prevail. And the winner gets to teach our children what to believe."

We had a dose of this last week when author ("The Roots of Obama's Rage") Dinesh D'Souza spoke in Bothell. He identified such cities as Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. as "the secular capitals of America -- We have given them up, relinquished them."

By what measure, in our free society, can anybody claim to "control" any place -- or assign ideology to a city. Riverside Church in New York was packed when last I visited. So was Sunday high mass at Church of the Advent in Boston.

But fear-mongering means fund raising, and exaggeration stirs the drilled right-thinking audience on Fox News. Intelligensia is a natural target. "I estimate there are 50,000 to 60,000 radical professors who want the terrorists to win and us to lose the war on terror," declared leftist editor-turned-right wing polemicist David Horowitz.

Cultural decline can be found in the strangest places, even an Oscar-winning, true story-based movie about the Holocaust. Sen. (then Rep.) Tom Coburn of Oklahoma took after NBC for airing Schindler's List.

America was being exposed to "full frontal nudity, violence and profanity," Coburn charged. "I cringe when I realize I realize that there were children all across this nation watching this program. It simply should not have been allowed on public television"

Coburn is the guy who warned of such rampant lesbianism that girls in some Oklahoma schools dared not go to the bathroom. After reading his film criticism in Moulitsas' book, one is moved to ask: Did the Nazis clothe concentration camp inmates? Did guards politely ask them to form a line?

Or there was the Weekly Standard's review of James Cameron's hit movie "Avatar": "The conclusion does ask the audience to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency. So it is a deep expression of anti-Americanism . . ."

As dailykos.com readers (often nicknamed Kossacks) know, Moulitsas is a quick study and quick in anger. He does not back away from a feud, for instance bringing out brownshirt bluster in Fox's Bill O'Reilly. He lives in a middle class Berkeley, Calif., neighborhood, and delights in puncturing the self-importance of Washington, D.C.'s media elite.

Hence, American Taliban is not a gentle book. It's digresses onto such topics as the dumping of two sick spouses by ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich: "He married his third wife in 2000, and ended up writing a book titled "Rediscovering God in America."

Moulitsas is the antithesis of Missouri's former Republican Sen. (and Episcopal priest) John Danforth, who writes with dignity and human examples about the harm done by and divisions caused by America's moral absolutists.

The book's mocking tones have drawn fire. The New Republic recently argued that it is absurdly excessive to liken America's far rightists to Islamic extremists.

Hmmm. Test that thesis on those whose loved ones worked in Oklahoma City's federal building, the family of a slain Holocaust Museum guard, or the wife of a Wichita abortion provider gunned down as he ushered in a Lutheran church.

But Moulitsas might have done -- should do -- more. Our nation's cultural warriors are being manipulated and underwritten by wealthy individuals and corporations. The scripture they read is the bottom line.

The goal is to mobilize foot soldiers behind a social agenda of rolling back reforms from Roosevelt to Roosevelt, from Social Security to the direct election of U.S. Senators. School prayer and banning abortion are come-on items in the front of the store.

Watching Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle and Sarah Palin, it's perhaps time to take stock of America's liberties and resolve to defend same.